151–160 of 213 posts
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Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.
(or in about:config set layout.css.always_underline_links true )
> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…
I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work. Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI, and everything since then has been worse. Then Microsoft started thinking it was a good idea to make native appli…
It isn't even that any more. Now you have "pills" and "Islands" of random rounded shapes completely disconnected from the context they are supposed to be impacting. things float above or next to things with no connection between them. Content suffers for fobs and exclusive sets (old timers call these radio buttons) or tabs are now just things that happen to be close enough that you should just know they're associated with each other.
Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI ( https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ ). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of…
> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…
Only six colours are used for text:
White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values.
Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.)
Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.)
Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem.
Red - Things that are an immediate danger to your safety.
Magenta - For navigation purposes, where you should be aiming the aircraft.
On touch screen UIs, buttons are bevelled grey and so what you can touch and what you can’t is extremely obvious.
Activated buttons are a distinctive colour. This colour varies between vendors but at least it’s consistent for a particular aircraft type; usually a light blue on Airbus, green on Boeing. The green seems most consistent with the text colour system, the button is green because the crew pressed it.
When are we going to start designing UIs based on scientific HCI instead of marketing BS? Or has that gone the way of the dodo?
Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.
This is why I run XFCE with the Chicago95 theme. Sure, it's Windows 95 but the 2000 UI wasn't a big divergence from memory. It's familiar and gets out of the way. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
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Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.
I live in regular fear that my fingertip will hit the wrong up/down icon.
Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI ( https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ ). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of…
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I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…
The Windows 95 UI designers wrote a paper going over their design methodology and how they incorporated feedback from real-world users at a variety of levels of computer proficiency into their design. https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 For example, the reason for the single "Start" button in the taskbar was that they initially had multiple buttons for different specific purposes, and relied on a "P…
TBH, I often have no idea whether anything is really a file/directory or some fake thing in Explorer, and this aspect has gotten worse over the years. Now they make it hard for users to find their home folder and present a bunch of virtual things that are confusing. Home, Gallery, Music, Videos - all virtual apparently. Moving things into OneDrive that used to be in the home folder. The Downloads folder, if clicked from the side panel, doesn't have a path, etc.
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I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.
Thanks! Settings > General > Browsing > Always underline links (or in about:config set layout.css.always_underline_links true )